Drip Dry 

“It’s just a presence in the moment,” says Dan McCarthy of his art-making process. “There’s no scheming. You’re just in the game. Breathe in, breathe out, and you’ve already gone 50 feet in one breath. I don’t have time to think about who I am or what I want.”

Dan and I are standing in what’s technically the grand hall of his upstate New York home/studio, but what feels like the nave. Surrounding us are saints: Dan’s ceramic facepots on wooden stands, a couple dozen of them—big, crooked smiles, brightly colored glaze dripping down their faces like tears. They illustrate the way we carry contradictions. Dan is wearing sneakers, paint-splattered cutoffs over black track pants, and a green-and-white-checked dress shirt. Like his facepots, he exudes both levity and intensity. 

“I’ve made my best work when something was discovered, and the discovery was inherent in the thing,” he says. 

Built in 1899, Dan’s home/studio was originally a Victorian schoolhouse that functioned as an elementary school from 1901 to 1977. But you hear less the echoes of children than of Gregorian chants. Under its 26-foot cathedral ceiling, stained a dark auburn, there is the temptation to whisper so as not to disturb our fellow worshippers. 

“With everything I make, I want it to have some life force in it that could be recognized for just that—a life force that could be the actual subject in the sense of the work,” Dan says.

We move downstairs into his painting studio. Leaning against the walls is a row of recent works. Against white backdrops, people dance naked, arms outstretched in fits of ecstasy, rainbows shooting out of or into their heads. On a low sawhorse table are paints and brushes. In the corner is a white square canvas with a cluster of faces at its center. Hanging on the wall behind us are a few of his rainbow paintings: bleeding, weeping psychedelic imagery on half-moon canvases. Some have band names written on them: Foghat, the Damned.

Gesturing toward his paintings, Dan says, “I like getting lost in the making of it. That’s why I’m here, to get lost in the making of it.”

The making extends beyond the works and into the house itself. In 2014, after nearly 30 years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Dan bought the three-story Romanesque stone manor with panoramic views of the Hudson Valley. He was 52 at the time, shedding one skin and stepping into another. 

“I originally moved to New York to become famous,” he tells me. “But, over time, I realized that the greatest thing would be freedom.”

What does he mean by freedom?

“In the last few years,” he says, “I’ve let go of any idea of success and what success meant to me, which was a type of prestige and acknowledgement and financial rewards. And by letting go of those things, I’ve opened up a freedom for myself. My idea of success and wanting to make it was actually a trap, a narrow hall that was closing in. Now I’m just really into life—facing life and participating in life without
my thinking on it.”

Hanging above us is a taxidermied fish. Nodding up at it, Dan says, “Sometimes I think about just disappearing down to some remote beach town, getting a boat, and fishing.”

*

Born in 1962, Dan grew up skateboarding and surfing in Huntington Beach, California. 

“We lived about 4 miles from the beach, so as soon as I was old enough, I was there on my own,” he says. “You could smell it before you could see it, the vaporized salt air. It seemed electromagnetically charged, like a compass needle indicating true north. To me, it seemed almost unbelievable that the ocean was right there and all you had to do was go in. Once you were in, you could begin to appreciate the potential of participating in something so wild and free.”

Dan was a creative kid, but he never had a lightning-bolt moment when he realized he wanted to be an artist. It was “more like a resignation.” In high school, he got into punk rock and went to shows: “It felt like one was on the edge of uncharted territory.” From ages 15 to 20, he worked as a deckhand on fishing boats: “I really enjoyed being on a boat floating right in the middle of the theater of nature.”

While Dan was attending Orange Coast College, the artist Peter Shire—known for his ceramics, furniture, toys, interior designs, and public sculptures that exude humor and playfulness—gave a talk that included slides of his work and his home in Los Angeles. Dan was struck by it. “He was willing to share his life and his process,” he says. “At that point, I hid my life.”

In 1982, Dan began attending the San Francisco Art Institute. “The motto of the painting department was ‘pushing paint,’” he says. “I learned that art can be an extension of both the physical and emotional self.” He had an affinity for German painters, particularly Sigmar Polke, whose work engages unconventional and diverse materials and techniques. “The German painting I liked best seemed to say, ‘This is what I feel,’” Dan recalls, “whereas the American painting at that time seemed to say, ‘This is what I think.’”

In 1989, at age 27, Dan moved to NYC with the dream of being a successful artist. He made work, but the recognition did not come.

“Around 1995, I was working doing carpentry and painting in total isolation,” he says. “Since no one was looking at my painting, I thought, I’ll just paint however I want and whatever I know. I was painting a lot of fish, and it became obvious how limited my subject was—that was, unless there was another variable besides the image, that variable being, of course, materials and gesture. Somehow, the freedom of whatever it was I was trying to express would exist within this framework: what I know and what I can express within the materials.”

Listening to this explanation from Dan, I’m reminded of a scene in the 1996 film Basquiat. Willem Dafoe plays an electrician working in a high-end gallery during the installation of one of Julian Schnabel’s shows. The young, about-to-explode Jean-Michel Basquiat, portrayed by Jeffrey Wright, is helping him. The electrician says, “You know, I’m an artist too. I sculpt. I’m just really finding myself now.…I’m going to be 40 in July, and you know, man, I’m glad I never got any recognition. It’s given me time to develop.” 

When I first met Dan, at a restaurant in Brooklyn in 2023, we connected over that scene, marveling at the way we self-rationalize—and how success can be its own form of failure.

“My style and technique is something that developed as I allowed myself to accept it,” he says. “I think I was often hiding behind found images and suppressing my hand, as I had often preferred the ready-made images of others over what I could make. I allowed myself a middle-ground place to accept my own handmade images, and in that came this personal imagery like the fish and skateboards, things I had known very well and considered integral to my worldview or my personal view of myself. I believe making work in this vein is an act of expressing, ‘This is who I am and what I think.’”

I first encountered Dan’s work via his book Skateboarders. While the paintings were made in 2019, his skaters are clearly of that late ’60s/early ’70s era when Dan was a young kid nailing roller-skate wheels to crude planks of wood and riding them around his Orange County neighborhood. 

The world was a mess at that time (when has it ever not been a mess?), but you’d never know it looking into Dan’s skaters’ eyes. Rendered in bright, washy color, the work invokes VW buses, lids of Maui Wowie, puka shell necklaces, and girls named Luna hitchhiking up Topanga Canyon, where, in 1969, Neil Young might have been sitting in his Sky Line Trail home composing “Cinnamon Girl” with his Crazy Horse bandmates.

“Going to the beach, going in the ocean—it was an unexplored freedom that was there for the taking.” 

I felt a particular “Cinnamon Girl” love for Newport Beach Skater, a painting of a female skateboarder who rides naked, in contrapposto, on a board that looks cut from Fred Flintstone’s garage. Her feathered hair is blonde, her skin fades from magenta to turquoise, her stance is awkward and gangly. Her right arm bends, her hand curls as if to bring a phantom apple to her mouth. Her smile is toothy, her nose is long, her big, bewildered eyes twinkle something comforting. 

Skateboarders led me to more of Dan’s work, and I was struck by his vibrant use of color, the way his people bounce with a joy, an ecstasy, an id. Some look balletic, or like a mashup of surf-skate-ballet. If you painted a board under their feet, off they would ride into the sunset (or rainbow). Others crouch mischievously, with feral eyes.

There’s a lot of skin in Dan’s work. When not fully naked, his subjects tend to wear little more than a bikini or a pair of shorts. Sometimes you get the sense of being in Golden Gate Park circa the Summer of Love. Or out at the Spahn Ranch with Squeaky and Susan and Tex. The skin is rarely of a natural tone, but brightly colored, with ombré fades, an alien glow emanating from within.

Surfing, too, is a recurring theme. “When I was a kid, the big surfer in Huntington Beach was David Nuuhiwa,” Dan says. “We’d see him out at the pier. He looked a mixture of Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee. He’d surf with a lit cigarette. So that was mastery right there.”

Dan recalls these days with fondness: “Going to the beach, going in the ocean—it was an unexplored freedom that was there for the taking. My paintings of surfers, fishermen, bodysurfers—I’m using those symbols to express feelings and experiences from that time.”

*

We are back upstairs, amid the nave’s facepots. They seem to have shifted with the light. Before, they wore tragicomic expressions. Now, they recall snowmen. No, not snowmen—snow cones. With faces. And inner lives.

“I’m personally just past the romantic idea of the artist, isolated, grinding away in the studio, self-obsessed with his work. It’s a cliché. It’s a real neat image for artists, right? Like Van Gogh, or Jesus Christ on the cross. He’s dying for it. But that’s not me,” says Dan, gesturing toward his facepots. “I’m glad I made it. I’m still making it. I would like to be able to not have to make anything, not have the desire to make anything.”

I ask how he found his way to ceramics. He tells me that he’d taken ceramics in college, but hadn’t touched clay for nearly three decades. In 2011, while visiting his mother in Northern California, he popped in on the UC Davis ceramics department, where he met an arts teacher who invited him to use the facilities. Dan returned the following summer, hoping to find traction with clay. He made things, but nothing that excited him. Then, one day, it clicked.

“I was riding my bike to campus through this residential neighborhood, and it was a recycling day, and there was a toy box and a stack of newspaper and a kid’s chair and an old stuffed animal, all tied together with string. They looked like totems or gifts, and they’re on the side of the street. I thought, I can do that. I can make a gift and leave it on the side of the street. And so that was my model for the facepots.”

In his Rainbow Facepots catalog, published in 2017, Dan writes, “I can walk around a pot for weeks or months before going to it with wet color. There is one chance to nail it, and it’s best approached sleepwalking. It’s much more a feeling and moment rather than an idea. Up close, it’s like colored syrup poured on a snow cone. Step back, it’s like holding a snow cone, melting and running. It becomes the snow cone, with flavored color running purple out the bottom of the wax-paper cone. At that point, the flavor is poured, the ice is melting, and it’s summer.”

I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating Dan’s facepots. I imagine them in conversation with each other. Not in the art-speak sense, but more in the literal. Were their feelings hurt when I said that they contained pathos? And did it worry them when Dan said that he thinks about moving to the Carolinas, getting a fishing boat, and spending his autumn years on the water, away from “the conversation?” 

Fish—and fishing—continue to be prominent in Dan’s work. In Spring Sea, a pair of fish breastfeed from a maternal woman who wears a hat of octopus. In White Shark, an androgynous, possibly amphibious person rides on the back of a plump white shark. There’s something biblical about Dan’s fish. The fish come and save the day.

“So if you were to just walk away from the art world and go fish, how would it go?” I ask.

“Well, I think the part of me that makes and creates would be the same part that would, you know, tune up the boat, and would know how to tie knots and attract fish,” says Dan. “Those same instincts, that same drive and curiosity and willingness, would translate into all those things.”

I ask what he hopes to convey with his work. 

“I don’t know that I’ve ever even had an original thought in the context of what originality is,” he says. “But my life and part in this is just showing up to it. It’s not that interesting, but hopefully the things I’ve made are interesting and might inspire someone and give them a sense of possibility in their life too. That would be what I’d like my work to do. To say, ‘Look, if I can do it, you can do it.’”

–To see more of McCarthy’s work, pick up a copy of his new book, FREEDOM, published by Rizzoli Electa, 208 pages.

[Feature image: DROP INN, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 58 × 46 inches.]